Page 10 of My Broken Biker

"You could have a submarine," she says.

"That's true," I say.

"Or you could be a fish." She thinks about this seriously while she twirls her pasta. "But if you were a fish you wouldn't know what you were missing. You'd just be a fish." She seems genuinely troubled by this conclusion. "I don't think I want to be a fish."

"Rainforest then," I say.

"Maybe. Or the middle. So you could choose."

I look at her. Six years old and she's solving the habitat problem by living on the boundary of two of them. "The outskirts of both," I say. "That's smart."

She shrugs, like obviously, and keeps eating.

My phone buzzes on the counter. I reach back without getting up. It's Deb: Maisie asking again about the sleepover situation, if you want the night off she's welcome anytime. Then a smiley face, which is how Deb signals she's joking when she isn't joking.

I look at the text. I look at Angela.

"Hey," I say. "Do you want to sleep at Maisie's tonight?"

The fork goes down.

"TONIGHT?" she says, at a volume suited to news of significantly larger scale than a sleepover.

"Deb just asked," I say.

She stares at me, working out if I mean it.

When she decides I do, something happens in every part of her body simultaneously, her whole face and both her arms and her feet under the table, everything committing to the news at once.

"I have to pack," she says.

"You haven't finished dinner," I say.

"I have to pack," she says, and she's already sliding off her chair.

"Angela."

She climbs back up. She eats the rest of her food with the urgency of someone who has somewhere to be, fork moving fast, eyes already somewhere else in her head, and when the bowl is empty she looks at me with pointed patience while I finish mine.

"Okay," I say.

She's down the hall before I've put my fork in the bowl.

The packing takes forty-five minutes.

Not because she doesn't know what she needs, but because knowing what she needs requires standing in the middle of her room with both arms at her sides and looking at her shelves and talking through the logic out loud while I stand in the doorway and either agree or enter negotiations.

The dinosaur encyclopedia, yes. The markers, but only the glitter ones because the full set doesn't fit and Maisie will specifically want the glitter ones. Gerald, obviously, Gerald goes without saying. The penguin pajamas, not the star ones with the faded star on the left knee. Toothbrush and toothpaste because Maisie might not have the mint kind and Angela only does the mint kind. The small flashlight.

"My rocks," she says.

"No rocks," I say.

"Just the special ones."

"How many are just the special ones?"

She studies the shelf. "Six. Maybe eight. Some of them are related."